Hollywood's creators, not its guilds, try to get ahead of AI

A new Hollywood coalition has launched to push for shared rules on artificial intelligence — but it is a coalition of individual creators, not the guilds themselves. The group, called Creators Coalition on AI, was founded by 18 people, including writer-director Daniel Kwan, actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natasha Lyonne and producer Janet Yang, former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Creators Coalition on AI positions itself as a cross-industry effort, distinct from labor unions or collective bargaining, focusing on establishing voluntary standards that can influence broader industry practices and policies. Guild members from SAG-AFTRA, the DGA and the WGA have signed on individually, alongside more than 500 other actors, artists and executives, but the organisation itself sits outside union structures.

The timing is not incidental. On December 11, Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI plus a licensing deal allowing Sora users to generate videos with over 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters, an agreement that lands as Disney simultaneously sues other AI companies for copyright infringement. Daniel Kwan didn’t mince words about the reaction, saying a lot of people felt “completely blindsided” by the deal. The coalition’s demands are broader than any single dispute, though: its four stated pillars cover transparency and compensation for training data, job protection, guardrails against deepfakes, and preserving human creativity in storytelling, pursued through public pressure, potential litigation and, if those fail, legislation.

The coalition’s leverage rests on public pressure and possible litigation for now, with legislation held in reserve rather than sought outright.

The coalition is notably one-sided in its composition rather than its rhetoric: the signatory list runs deep with A-list talent but notably light on studio executives and tech representatives — Disney, which just made the biggest AI content deal in entertainment history, isn’t involved, and neither is OpenAI. Its founders have also been careful not to frame this as blanket opposition to the technology: the coalition’s website states explicitly that this “is not a full rejection of AI.” That is a harder line to hold than to state, given how easily “creators versus AI” flattens into a fight that overstates how unified either side actually is. Whether public pressure and voluntary standards achieve what two years of strike-won contract language could not is, for now, untested.